Kindergarten Children's Perceptions of "Anthropomorphic Artifacts" with Adaptive Behavior

Introduction In recent years, children from kindergartens in central Israel have been exposed to learning experiences in technology as part of the implementation of a curriculum on technological thinking. The curriculum has been developed upon the idea that technological thinking integrated into the kindergarten's culture will stimulate the children's curiosity and will support, and even demand, the use of higher-order thinking, analytic capabilities, abstraction, and problem solving, laying out the road to knowledge building processes and learning. The demand for such technological-thinking related skills is not usually part of the curriculum in Israeli kindergartens. A unique strand within the implemented curriculum deals with the issue of 'smart artifacts'--computer controlled adaptive systems. Children are exposed nowadays from a very young age to controlled technological systems. A visit to the nearest shopping centre introduces them to automatic doors, escalators, anti-theft security equipment, or automated control gates in parking lots. Many toys they play with are programmable, and at home they interact with complex tools and devices, e.g., remote-controlled appliances, mobile phones, and computers. Children are born into a technological world comprising a wide range of smart artifacts; hence, it is only natural that the kindergarten's learning environment embraces these advanced technologies as well. The rationale of this study addresses the fact that while smart artifacts and robotic systems are being increasingly adopted as educational resources in many kindergartens, key questions deserve still to be examined: What do we know about children's understanding of artificial-adaptive behavior? What developmental affordances and constraints support or restrain children's understanding? What understanding and skills does the interaction with the robotic systems promote? How might systematic knowledge about children's understandings and capabilities help for planning mindful integration of robotic systems as educational tools? In our studies with kindergarten children we address these and similar questions--this paper reports our findings about children's stance towards programmable artifacts with adaptive behavior. Background The ambiguous status of computational objects among artifacts was studied in a series of works. In van Duuren & Scaife's study (1996) artifacts with different anthropomorphic features, i.e., interactive and adaptive behaviors that can be interpreted by children as psychological reality and a person, were used to elicit children's associations as regards to issues such as mental acts of dreaming; motor acts of walking; sensory acts and feelings; and even the very question as to whether the objects have a brain. While children's ideas about a doll, book, and person did not show any developmental differences, the "clever artifacts"--a robot and a computer--showed developmental differences. By the age of 7 years, children construe such intelligent machines as cognitive objects. Along similar lines, Francis and Mishra (2008) asked children (aged 3 to 8) to interact with "anthropomorphic toys" of three types--a stuffed dog, a mechanical cat, and a robotic dog--varying in level of complexity of their observable functioning. They requested children to tell if these are "real" and to interact with them. They report on differences between the children's verbal descriptions, mostly acknowledging the ontological reality that these are not real, and their behaviors, indicating confusion concerning the reality of the robotic dog--the most sophisticated toy. As well, they report on extensive use of anthropomorphic language as opposed to non-anthropomorphic language. Ackermann (1991), in describing children and adults' understanding of controlled systems or self-regulating devices, proposes two perspectives: psychological and engineering. The psychological point-of-view conceives intelligent artifacts as living creatures, attributed with intentions, awareness, personalities, and volition. …